Bergeron writes about local, state & national topics, as well as other matters of interest.

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Kristallnacht, the Beginning of a Terrifying Nightmare

Seventy-two years ago to this day, the Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler instigated riots all over Germany against its Jewish citizens. When it was all over hundreds of synagogues had been ransacked, many destroyed, and at least 267 of them set on fire.

The fury of the mobs was also let loose on thousands of Jewish businesses and homes throughout Germany and parts of Austria, where sledgehammers were taken to Jewish property. The broken glass which littered the streets gave this – the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust – its name Kristallnacht, “night of the broken glass”

A swell of anti-Semitic sentiment had been gradually building up prior to the night of November 9, 1938, but it was the killing of a German diplomat by a 17-year old German-born Jew, Herschel Grynzpan, which became the pretext for this organized assault against Judaism:

Herschel’s parents had been deported to Poland, together with thousands of other Jews of Polish origin, despite the fact that by the 1920’s, “most German Jews were fully integrated into German society as German citizens.” (See: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html)

That night of state-sponsored terror would become the formal beginning of years of nightmarish oppression, starvation, and abuse that European Jews would endure.

It would not stop until Allied troops put an end to World War II, finally liberating the concentration camps and ending the persecutions that we now know of as The Holocaust.

This gives every rational-thinking American pause to consider what would happen to Jews in the Middle East, if anti-Semites like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had their way.